Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Friday in Yass I had the opportunity to sit and talk at length with three concerned advocates, Hansie Armour, Rebecca Tobin and Andrea Strong, in relation to the powerlines on huge towers that are going to go through their wonderful part of the world. There has been a lot of controversy about these powerlines and the height of the towers upon which they will sit. These three advocates are genuine in their desires to see the lines placed underground, and had a number of cogent and reasonable arguments as to why this should be so.

The thing that often concerns me when companies and organisations and, dare I say, governments put in place infrastructure that is going to affect people's vista, communities or environment is that all too often when the representative is sent out to knock on the door or to visit the farm, they come there with only scant details of the actual project. When they come there again, it's a different person altogether. When they line up at the community forums which often happen as a result of community concerns being raised and not answered or met, again, it's a different representative. I'm not saying this is the case on this particular project, but it also bothers me greatly that these days we seem to have in this nation—particularly in New South Wales—projects placed under state-significant status. State-significant priority supersedes all local development plans. It overrides any community concerns. It rides roughshod over what a local government or a council can do about a particular project. Whether it's powerlines and towers, solar farms, wind turbines—you name it—it's stamped 'state significant' and locals do not get any say in that project. Generally, that project will be financed by an overseas company or a superannuation firm. They'll claim a whole heap of jobs in the construction phase, and that's all well and good—we all want more jobs. But often these projects come at a huge cost to local people, their amenity, their views and their environment. I think something really needs to be done with the EPBC Act, with these 'state significant' projects, to say 'enough is enough'. Locals must get a say. There has to be some consideration.

What we have before us is the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. It was introduced to the House, rather unexpectedly, with a view to being passed before the parliament rises. Many people in the corridors here will be telling you that this is the last parliamentary sitting week. We saw what happened on the last parliamentary sitting day last year when Labor rushed through a whole heap of legislation. Debate was guillotined, debate was gagged and bills went through—to hell with people's local concerns. People who have been sent here to represent their local constituents weren't able to speak on a bill. They weren't able to raise objections against a bill. Labor just bulldozed it through. Labor, which came to office in May 2022, said it was going to be—

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A kinder, gentler parliament.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

a kinder, gentler parliament. They would not do this sort of thing, they said. But they did exactly what they said they weren't going to do. Not only did they do it; they did an avalanche of it. It was a tsunami of legislation being pushed through the House of Representatives and the Senate.

This bill amends the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Act 2021, under which offshore wind projects are managed. Let me tell you there is a lot of concern about offshore wind projects. I can remember the then Prime Minister, the former member for Cook, when there were some concerns about offshore exploration initiatives—these concerns were certainly raised, and people up and down the Central Coast, off Sydney and down to the Illawarra were throwing their hands up at Labor. We heard their voices loud and clear. They were running to the media and they were doing everything they could to oppose it. But it seems that if you want to do an offshore wind project these days, that's fine.

The rush to renewables bothers me. But it doesn't just bother me. Whether it's offshore wind projects or whether it's on prime agricultural land, it is certainly bothering the farmers of the Riverina. Don Kirkpatrick and others will tell you there is only so much arable land that can be used to grow food and fibre. What we don't want is for that land to be covered with solar panels as far as the eye can see, covered with easements so that you can't do anything because you've got some dirty great big wind tower—or electricity tower or whatever tower—higher than the Rialto or the Eiffel, all at the expense of prime agricultural land.

Yes, you'll have willing sellers. It's the same as the Murray-Darling argument. You'll get the water minister and the environment minister saying, 'Oh, they're willing sellers.' Well, sometimes the land is owned by people who do not have growing food as their No. 1 priority. Yes, they own the land. But the trouble is that when you plonk down a massive tower, it often ruins the arrangements and the environment for all those around it who are wanting and desiring to grow food and fibre.

Mark my words: Australian farmers grow the very best food and fibre in the world. Nobody grows better food and fibre than Australians, yet Australians have been under attack from this government from day one. This government wanted to bring in a truckies tax. It wanted to bring in a biosecurity tax which was going to make our farmers—wait for this—pay for the biosecurity of foreign food coming in and competing with their products, Australian products, on Australian supermarket shelves. What country in the world would do that? What country in the world would penalise its farmers to that extent? No country would, and ours shouldn't either.

Our farmers are also under pressure. They're stressed because of the 450 gigalitres of water that is going to be taken out of the mouth of the Murray. What do you reckon they'll do with that water? They'll push it out of the mouth of the Murray. When Flinders and Bass were doing their circumnavigation of the country, the sandbars blocked up the mouth of the Murray, and it wasn't initially recorded as being the mouth of the Murray, a river-estuary system, because it was blocked up. What we do these days is push our freshwater out the mouth of the Murray and don't use it to grow food and fibre. It's just crazy. We've got those opposite who don't and won't want to build dams. I have to say that I, as the Deputy Prime Minister and the infrastructure minister, built the Camden dam at Scottsdale in Tasmania, where 85 irrigators are now growing tremendous food and fibre because of that project, but I digress. Let's talk about the bill.

There are some reasons—and sound ones—for this amendment. For example, it does close a loophole which enables rejected offshore applicants to be granted licences in smaller and/or different areas, but there are a number of areas of concern. The bill applies changes retrospectively. I always worry when Labor decides to do things retrospectively. I always worry when they want to go back and delve into the past and say: 'This bit of paperwork over here—we'll just get that, and then it will be okay. It was three years ago, but you know what? We'll just apply it retrospectively.' It always worries me. You can't trust Labor.

Indeed, Member for Wannon!

There's no industry consultation. It does my head in that Labor in opposition always used to go on about the stakeholders, but Labor ministers won't take meetings. They won't. And they don't consult. It wouldn't matter whether it's electricity infrastructure, child care, health or veterans. Actually, I'll take veterans back. The veterans' affairs minister is actually doing a reasonable job. But there are so many areas of endeavour that Labor is not doing a good job on. It just worries me when stakeholders who know their sectors inside out aren't getting a say. They're just not getting a say. If they were, the bills coming before the House might be refined and might be better. They might be improved. We all want better legislation because we can pass it in a bipartisan way. Even in the Gillard government, 88 per cent of the bills which came before the parliament were passed in a bipartisan way because, I must say, that government probably consulted better than this government does. It did. True. Now it's political.

This bill will make it easier for the minister to announce multiple feasibility licences throughout the campaign. That's what, of course, he wants to do. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy just wants to push renewables onto an unsuspecting public. Why is it fair that regional Australia has to carry the brunt of the energy needs of capital city people who have no regard or scope or concern or understanding of what it is doing and impacting upon regional Australia? And you get those supercilious teals.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sanctimonious.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They are sanctimonious, Member for Mallee. They're dressed-up Greens. They're Greens with trust funds. The member for Parkes called them that. He sounded them out really easily and really quickly and really early. He summed them up. They want to stand and talk about what renewables we need in this country, yet they couldn't care less whether regional Australia is just covered with renewable energy projects, and they don't give a jot that what is being sacrificed is prime agricultural land. I will always defend our farmers, and I'll always defend their right to grow the very best food in all of the world. The teals just think that that wonderful clean, green, fresh food comes from a supermarket fridge or aisle. It does not. It comes from—wait for it—a farm! They go around and they call these projects wind farms. Well, they're not wind farms. You can't farm wind; you can farm food. It should be known to those teals and the Greens.

We heard the member for Melbourne, the Greens leader, bell the cat in the 90-second statements just before question time. He wants a governance-sharing arrangement with Labor, and God help Australia if that is the case. God help farmers if the Greens get their hands on the treasury benches, and woe betide regional Australians—regional Australians who carried this country during COVID; regional Australians who bent their backs and whose brows sweated to make sure that we grew the food and the fibre and had the mining resources to keep the lights on, to keep the export balance of payments and to keep this country going when all those teals, all those city types and all those Greens pulled up the doona and pretended nothing was happening. That is the Greens way. That is the teals way. That is the Labor way.

It is the Liberals and the Nationals who have a plan to get this nation back on track. It is the Liberals and Nationals who understand farmers, who appreciate farmers, who applaud farmers and who will back regional Australians to make this country the best it can be.

Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Thursday, I and the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, gave a clear-cut commitment to the electorate of Wannon. We will rescind the offshore wind farm which is proposed for off the coast of Warrnambool and Port Fairy—no ifs, no buts; we will rescind it. The reason we're here this afternoon is another reason why we made that decision—because Chris Bowen has a piece of retrospective legislation that he's trying to rush through this parliament that will change the rules around offshore wind farm zones. Once again, we're seeing that Minister Bowen makes a complete and utter mess of everything that he touches when it comes to energy and, in particular, when it comes to offshore wind zones. There has been no consultation, no environmental impact statements, no economic benefit statements—nothing—and that is why we are committed to making sure that that offshore wind zone is absolutely rescinded if the coalition wins the next election.

Let's go to this piece of retrospective legislation, the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. What is a government trying to do when it puts in place a piece of retrospective legislation? It's trying to clean up a mess—a mess of its own making; a mess made because it rushed things; a mess made because it doesn't have a clue about what it's doing; a mess made because the minister has an ideological bent towards a rushed, renewables-only approach which is devastating this nation. Why is the minister going down this path? He is going down this path because he's trying to do everything he can to disguise a commitment that the Prime Minister made on over 90 occasions before the last election—a commitment that now shall not speak its name, not from the lips of the Prime Minister or anyone on the Labor side of politics—and that was that your power bill would go down by $275. And they said that they would do that by 2025. Well, guess what year it is? It's 2025. And has anyone seen their power bill go down by $275? No. What has occurred? Everyone has seen their power bill go up. In Victoria, it has gone up by, at a minimum, $750. That means they've been more than $1,000 out. That is why the minister is rushing around, trying to do all this stuff, because he knows that, if he's going to be honest with the Australian people and look them in the eye, he cannot say to them, 'Yes, we have honoured that commitment.'

The minister will make a range of excuses to do with what's happened here and what's happened there et cetera et cetera, but the fact is the fact is the fact—they committed to reduce your power bill by $275 and have not been able to honour that commitment. They don't even have the guts to say to the Australian people that they won't be honouring it. That is why the Australian people have woken up to this Prime Minister. They know that he will not be straight with them. As for Minister Bowen, to be kind to Minister Bowen, he'd be more at home in a circus than he would be in this federal parliament. It is incredibly hard to take anything he says or does seriously.

Let's look at the offshore wind farm proposed off the coast of south-west Victoria. Firstly, it was going to be around the Portland area. When he realised that he'd messed that up, he said, 'Alright, I'll put it on the coast off Warrnambool and Port Fairy.' Guess where he made the announcement that he wasn't going to do it in Portland and that he was going to do it off the coast of Port Fairy and Warrnambool? He made the announcement in Portland. He didn't even know where he was when he was making the announcement. It was beyond a farce. Then, with the community consultation process, the community said they didn't want this offshore wind farm, and a petition was presented to the parliament, which had 4,000 signatures and now has 7,000 signatures. Did Minister Bowen listen? No, he did not. Did he go to the communities and say, 'Okay, we've done the consultations, and therefore we've heard you, and we're not going to proceed?' No, he didn't. Guess how the consultations went? And I'm sure the member for Mallee knows a lot about this type of consultation. When all the officials came down, did they meet with the community as a whole? No. What did they say to the community? 'Oh, look, we want to meet you one by one. We don't want to front up to a public meeting where there might be 200 or 300 of you and where you might say, "We don't want this," and there might be wild cheers and might say, "Well, maybe you should pack your bags and head back to Canberra with a clear message we don't want this."' No. It's almost like a drafting race: you go over to that corner and you go off to that corner so that we can deal with you one by one, so there is no sense of the community coming together and being heard. It's a tactic they always try and use when they're trying to ram something through that isn't popular and that the community does not want. Well, the community wasn't going to buy that.

There were representatives of the community who met with Minister Bowen and said quite clearly, 'No, we don't want this to go ahead.' Yet, what did Minister Bowen do? He said, 'Well, I'm going to be tricky; I'm just going to redraw this offshore wind farm in a part of the south-west coast where I think everyone will say, "Okay, that's fine."' Did it have any details around where the transition line might go? No. Is the transmission line going to go through Port Fairy or is it going to go right across the seabed to Portland? We hear absolutely nothing. Does the minister come forward to say whether an environmental impact statement would take place? Does the minister let the community know that there are already deep concerns within his department about where the offshore wind farm zone is proposed? No, he doesn't. So what did we do? We put in an FOI request to his department to ask: 'Have there been serious concerns raised about migratory and rare whales? Have there been serious concerns raised about migratory bird species?' And guess what the answer was from that FOI request from within his own department. 'Yes, there have been.' Quite clearly, the area in his department which deals with this had already raised serious concerns about these issues.

Did Minister Bowen stop and think and listen and say, 'Alright, I've got community opposition from south-west Victoria, and I've got opposition from within my own department because they're worried about the environmental impacts; therefore, maybe I should just say, no, this isn't an area where we should be looking to put an offshore wind zone'? No, he didn't. He, in his purely ideological fashion, just kept on going and said, 'We will ram this over the heads of the local community.' Well, we've made it very clear that we are happy to listen and we are happy to act. That's why I and the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, made that announcement last week. This is quite clear an issue. It's an issue which has been on the agenda since last May. I would say to all candidates in the seat of Wannon: come forward and tell us what your position is. You've had nearly a year to do it. Are you for it or against it? Or, if you're going to sit on the fence, why are you sitting on the fence? What is your hidden agenda? That is what we need to know, and that is what we need to know quite, quite clearly.

Just so everyone is clear about what we're trying to achieve here, we're trying to make sure that a local community and their views are protected. This isn't something which is political. Do you know who did exactly the same thing? The South Australian Premier. This wind farm zone was, in its first iteration under Minister Bowen, going to go into South Australia. It was going to go across and into South Australia. Right across the shoreline, out from Port Macdonnell, there was going to be, also, a proposal for this offshore wind zone. And what did the Premier of South Australia do, along with the local community? They made it very clear to Minister Bowen they didn't want it. They didn't want it. So this isn't anything which is political; this is about local communities standing up and saying: 'We want to be heard. We want to be listened to.' I say to Minister Bowen: the best thing you could do, rather than putting forward retrospective legislation which shows how much of a mess you've made of this, is get the bit of paper which has put in place the offshore wind farm zone in south-west Victoria—get the bit of paper that has put in place the offshore wind farm zone off the coast of Port Fairy and Warrnambool—and rip it up. That is what listening to the local community would be all about, and that's what you should be doing, not trying to put through retrospective legislation which shows that you have made a complete and utter mess of this whole process.

James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to further contribute to the excellent points made by my friend the member for Wannon. He articulated at the end of his comments there the South Australian perspective of the Albanese government's now abandoned plans for offshore wind zones in South Australia. Indeed, it was the Labor Premier of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, that turned his back on the federal Labor government's energy policy position—not just on this issue, I might add. He's a very pro-nuclear guy, Peter Malinauskas. He likes nuclear. He wants nuclear submarines in Adelaide. He thinks nuclear is safe. I think he has got to be a little bit loyal to his party and has to watch his words, but I think he'd be a very excited partner.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 16:59 to 17:19

I think I was just making the point, before the bells went, that the South Australian Labor Premier, Peter Malinauskas, joined many others in opposing the South Australian component of the designated wind farm zone that Minister Bowen sought to create. As I was saying, there couldn't be a starker difference between the South Australian Labor Premier and the federal Labor energy minister when it comes to matters of the energy future for this country. The Premier in South Australia has been very open-minded on nuclear and very keen to embrace the opportunities of the AUKUS submarine agreement for Adelaide. In fact, you'd think it was his idea from the way he discusses it and talks about it as his own. He's made many comments over the years in support of considering civilian nuclear generation to be a part of the mix in South Australia and Australia as a whole. Indeed, I strongly suspect that, if we win the election in the coming months, the South Australian government will be a very willing partner in discussions about nuclear in South Australia.

He's also probably pretty unpopular with Minister Bowen because the South Australian Labor government are extremely embracing of natural gas as an important fuel source for our energy grid well into the future. Of course, the Moomba gas fields that straddle the South Australia-Queensland border are a vitally significant industry for South Australia. The only ASX 100 listed company that's headquartered in Adelaide is Santos, who, of course, have a decades-long history of extracting gas from Moomba and piping it down to the rest of South Australia—and, of course, now there's also a pipeline that goes to Gladstone in Queensland.

So the Labor Premier in South Australia is not very much in tune with this federal Labor government. The Western Australian Premier, equally, is not very much in tune with this government on energy issues or issues of environmental red tape. I suppose they still have Jacinta Allan, the Victorian Premier, to hang out with if they choose to do so in the upcoming campaign. All strength to their arm on that. Maybe the one person who, when standing next to the Prime Minister, would enable him to feel that he is not the more unpopular of the two would be the Victorian Premier. 'Least worst'—what a slogan! There's a TV ad in that, I think: 'It could be worse.'

We're debating a bill that is a clean-up job for this government on significant flaws in legislation that have been revealed through a judicial decision. We in the coalition are very uncomfortable with the retrospectivity principles of this, on top of the policy principles of where this government is taking us. They went to the last election and said power prices were going to drop by $275. Poor old RepuTex! I hope they've changed their name and got a new website, because their name is absolute mud. They are the company that did the costings on Labor's $275 energy saving, and you wouldn't want to engage them for anything given what would happen when you google their name now, after they had their credibility completely destroyed by Minister Bowen and this federal Labor government's energy plan, which has delivered anything but cost savings for Australian families.

Hydrogen, regrettably, is coming unstuck all across the country, and I think that the South Australian government will very shortly announce that their hydrogen plant is miraculously going to become a natural gas plant. They've already softened this up through local media coverage, saying that the steelworks situation in Whyalla means that maybe their $600 million hydrogen plant, which would definitely be more than $1 billion now, isn't viable—not that that was ever the reason they gave for undertaking this hydrogen investment in the upper Spencer Gulf. They've been briefing out to the media that the turbines that they've purchased, which were going to run the hydrogen generation, can have natural gas as an alternate fuel source to hydrogen. They haven't purchased any electrolysers yet. That's lucky—if they're not going ahead with this hydrogen plant—that they haven't been saddled with the huge cost of electrolysers.

It's very conveniently looking like the South Australian government are going to be abandoning hydrogen, which is in line with everyone else in this country that is abandoning hydrogen, which this government says is an integral part of their future vision for the energy needs of this country. Whether it's offshore wind or the $1½ trillion worth of transmission lines, which we don't want to see built—happily for the communities that will be affected, we've got such an incompetent government that they can't even successfully roll out an unpopular policy like $1½ trillion worth of transmission. But it will probably ultimately come if we don't get rid of this awful government and their dangerous energy policies.

On all of the metrics that they were meant to hit when it comes to their energy vision for our future, they're failing. On some, we're lucky that they're failing, through incompetence. Of course, Australian families have been deeply, deeply let down by their failure to achieve the central promise of their energy policy plan, which was cutting household bills by $275—a confirmed failure. So many families and so many businesses are now almost frightened to open that bill that they get in the mail with their energy retailer's logo in the corner. Some retailers might want to take their logo off just so there's a better chance of people opening their mail because of that bill shock that you get when you open your electricity bill, under a government that said it was going to cut your bill by $275, and you suddenly find you've got to cancel the family holiday that you've done every year on that long weekend to the caravan park by the sea. You've got to pay your electricity bills, you've got to pay your rent or mortgage, you've got to provide for your family, and you've got to pay the grocery bills. It's that discretionary expenditure—the things that people look forward to and enjoy—that they're having to cut out of their household budget.

It's no wonder that we're seeing this anger, particularly in parts of Australia that are doing it the most tough, because this is not the life that they thought they were getting by voting for this Labor government. They shouldn't be mocked for thinking it was safe to trust Labor and that they wouldn't blatantly lie about cutting your electricity bill. We should live in a society where, when people that aspire to be prime minister of this country say something like: 'Vote for me. I've got a costed policy here with good old RepuTex—so it's got a big stamp on the side saying, "This thing can be relied upon",' it's not unreasonable for people to think, 'I'm sure he couldn't possibly lie to us about something like that and I would like my electricity bill to drop by $275.' People would've fallen for that, and it's a great disgrace and a shame on those that perpetrated that fraud on the people of Australia that they were misled to that extent.

We've made it very clear that we have a very different vision for our energy future, one that people can count on and rely on, one that has been properly costed, one that is credible and is being pursued around the world by every advanced economy except ours—funnily, because we've got the largest uranium deposits on the planet. In fact, in my home state of South Australia, we have the largest uranium mine at Olympic Dam, run by BHP. Of course, we have not had a civilian nuclear generation industry until Peter Dutton, the opposition leader, and the coalition said: 'This has to be the future for our nation. This will bring us the security and reliability we need. This will give confidence to investors to invest in our economy, to set up businesses here and to bring businesses here knowing that there's a reliability of energy, one of the vital inputs to our economic recipe.'

Going to the people of Sturt, like my other coalition colleagues and candidates will be doing, we have a solution to this Labor mess. The bill before us is a great example of the chaos that energy policy in this country is in under our Prime Minister and under this Labor government. It has to come to an end, which is why we've made the very deliberate decision to put the most comprehensive energy plan out in the public domain with all the detail that people need to understand it properly. It's there to be scrutinised—very unsuccessfully from those who have tried so far, I might add—a plan that will achieve our commitment to net zero by 2050. I echo our shadow energy minister—it will be very hard to get to net zero by 2050 with nuclear; it'll be impossible to do without it. No-one on the planet has a credible plan to get to net zero by 2050 without nuclear, not a single person.

Apparently, our Prime Minister and energy minister know better than everyone else. We know what their track record is because we can see it in that $275 electricity saving that they achieved for every household in this country. We oppose this bill. We more broadly oppose the chaos of energy policy in this country under this government. Thankfully for the people of Australia, there is an election coming within months, if not weeks. It's a great chance to get our country back on track, to get our energy policy back on track and to bring certainty, reliability and stability to Australian families and Australian businesses. I urge the House to defeat this bill.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I rise to speak on the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, I reflect on where I am standing: the Federation Chamber, the chamber where non-controversial bills land and where non-controversial speeches are made, apparently. The shadow minister for climate change and energy earlier challenged why this bill is being sent to this chamber, which was used for covert purposes earlier in this parliamentary session in Labor's hope that the media weren't watching. Newsflash: they probably are. There's no press gallery here, but I can assure you the Australian public are watching this government very closely on energy policy. They are watching failure after failure from the Albanese Labor government to deliver the $275 reduction in their power prices, which was promised 97 times to help Mr Albanese get into the Lodge.

Labor's energy approach comes at five times the cost Australians were initially promised. Australians are watching quarterly wholesale prices rise to a level of over $100 per megawatt hour, when Minister Bowen promised that wholesale prices would be just $51 per megawatt hour. Wholesale prices skyrocketed 83 per cent in the past year, with record highs in New South Wales and Queensland. So what was Labor's 2022 pre-election energy modelling? Perhaps it was complete and utter fantasy. Perhaps they accepted their modelling from their cowboy mates in the foreign owned wind turbine industry, for goodness-knows-what benefit to everyday Australians.

So we come to this bill, and the shadow minister mentioned in the House a 'protection racket'. He asked, 'Why is this government running a protection racket?' When you consider that the majority, if not all, of both the offshore and onshore wind turbine proponents are foreign owned, you have to ask if the Albanese government is acting in the national interest. Why are foreign owned energy companies acting like cowboys across Australia, dividing communities with sham consultations, as the member for Wannon said earlier? Why the haste to put this retrospective legislation through the parliament in what may well be the dying days of the Albanese Labor government?

Labor still hasn't told us how much offshore wind will cost or how much it will cost on our power bills. Given their track record, either they don't know or they don't care, as long as their cowboy mates in the foreign owned wind turbine industry get to railroad regional communities. You only need to look at their form—not only in my electorate of Mallee, as I was saying earlier this sitting week on the appropriation bill and Victorian Labor's fast-tracking of regulations to turn my electorate into a pincushion of wind turbine projects and a spider's web of transmission lines on prime agricultural land.

On transmission lines, let me add that there are people with very interesting lives who listen to parliament and are listening right now. One took it upon themselves to write to me, responding to my earlier speech this week, saying, 'Nuclear energy will require transmission lines just like wind turbines do.' No, that's incorrect. The coalition's policy is to establish nuclear energy facilities to support energy jobs at existing coal-fired power sites in the existing transmission network. That's the nonsense that those opposite—and their ideological friends in the Greens and Climate 200-backed teals—propagate in Australia. They gaslight Australians that regional people want wind turbines. When you actually ask regional people, farmers facing the imposition of wind turbines, their answer is a 90 per cent no, they don't. That is a fact. Nuclear will not require the 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines across regional Australia that Labor is proposing.

This is a government waging an ideological war on coal and gas, offering damp squibs to coal and gas miners and workers—for instance, proposing coal-fired workers in the Hunter Valley be re-employed making solar panels.  Never mind, that's in Labor's la-la land, where China already dominates the market and nobody in business would go anywhere near trying to take China on without serious subsidies. Labor has weakened the energy grid and Australians are being forced to rely on expensive unreliable renewables without the necessary firming power. Labor has no plan for affordability, no plan for reliability, and certainly no plan to keep the lights—and Aussie families are paying the price. It's time to embrace a balanced energy mix as a cheap, clean and consistent path forward.

I surveyed thousands of voters in my Mallee electorate and asked, 'Do you support extracting more gas for use in Australia?' This is in Victoria, remember, where the Andrews and Allan Labor governments cripple investment and exploration for gas. Over two-thirds of Mallee voters—68.6 per cent—said, yes, they support extracting more gas for use in Australia. Just 15.7 per cent said no. Incidentally, 46.5 per cent of respondents said that Australia's carbon emissions reduction targets are too high, and 62.5 per cent said they were likely to support nuclear power, like small modular reactors, as part of Australia's future energy mix. This is Australians talking. When asked whether they thought our energy system should prioritise reducing emissions, ensuring electricity is affordable or ensuring reliable supply, 57 per cent backed affordability. I don't think this Labor government gets it.

The Australian people are not mugs, but Labor is trying to take the Australian public for mugs. Australians see their power bills going up, they listen to the energy minister, Chris Bowen, say that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, and they laugh. It's not, 'Ha ha, that's a funny joke.' It's a nervous laugh, which would be funnier if it weren't so painful. This government is a joke, but it's not the funny kind; it's the sick joke kind. I can tell you that Mallee voters cannot wait to render their verdict at the ballot box.

It gets worse, though. This vindictive brand of Labor that we currently have at federal and Victorian levels takes the insult one further. They determined that Mallee would be the state's primary renewable energy zone. There were going to be six REZs—renewable energy zones—but three of them suddenly vanished. Two others are in Mallee, and the other will point the foreign owned wind turbine cowboys to Wannon. But the big purple patch on the Labor REZ map is absolutely Mallee. 'Go bulldoze your way through Mallee,' they tell the foreign owned wind turbine cowboys. 'Pretend you care, but go your hardest. Conduct a fig leaf consultation, but, hey, we've got your back. We'll fast-track the laws; we'll have sham environmental approvals so you can get through.' Why? We know there is a rush for Labor's political target, a hypothetical emissions reduction target that is hurting every Australian in their power bills—a mad rush to a renewables future because Labor have thrown dirt in the face of coal and gas and said, 'Get out of our country!' 'Nick off,' they say. 'We've got abundant wind and solar.'

There's one problem. The wind doesn't blow at the precise moment everyone has their air conditioners on in the peak of summer when the sun has gone down. It's very thoughtless of the sun and wind to do that—to not shine and blow when Labor want them to for their supposedly green dreams! I can picture the minister, frustrated by the setting sun, saying, 'How will renewables be the cleanest form of energy if you keep going down all the time?' It's like King Canute yelling at the tide, a footnote in history. King Canute was actually trying to demonstrate that his power had limits and that nature, or God in his context, had a supremacy he could not counteract. But not the Albanese government, not the energy minister—they'll yell that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, because they hope that, if they say it enough, the lie will become the truth.

I want to commend my colleague the member for Nicholls for moving a bill, the Requiring Energy Infrastructure Providers to Obtain Rehabilitation Bonds Bill 2024. The premise of the bill is a simple one. I have mentioned energy cowboys, the foreign owned companies that come and build projects. But who knows if they'll still be around to clean up the mess if they've gone broke, leaving these huge turbines in the ground, rusting away. Let's remember that the onshore turbines proposed for my electorate are at this stage potentially up to 280 metres high, 17 metres short of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, one of Australia's tallest buildings. As I said earlier this week in the House, there's a turbine over 350 metres high proposed for Germany right now, which, if built here in Australia, would make it one of the nation's tallest constructions.

These energy cowboys, foreign owned companies, want to put massive turbines offshore. It seems to me that the member for Nicholls's bill—and I disclose an interest, a very passionate and strong interest, in the genesis of that bill—is a perfectly reasonable proposition. If you're putting gigantic infrastructure on Australian shores, you need to put down the money to show you'll rehabilitate them when they are finished. Nobody has a crystal ball, and it's fanciful to suggest that, in decades or centuries to come, wind turbines will be a permanent fixture in our oceans, mountains and landscapes. They will become redundant and they will need to be removed. Requiring a rehabilitation bond is surely environmentally responsible.

The political children on the crossbench, principally the Greens, like to hop up and down and demand that miners rehabilitate land if mines go ahead. We have state laws that require that rehabilitation. It is the law of the land. Yet somehow if it's an energy project, such as wind turbines, no, the Greens go missing. Don't impose environmental rehabilitation requirements on wind projects! God forbid! As one older lady said at a public meeting I attended in Warracknabeal in my electorate, admitting she's not a very good shot, if a farmer shot an eagle they would be prosecuted, yet somehow, if a wind turbine chops one up, that's good for the environment, or it's okay with the activists.

Let's not forget that popular Counting Crows song, often wistfully sung by would-be environmentalists, bemoaning that 'they paved paradise and put up a parking lot'. Well, in my electorate of Mallee, they're wrecking paradise and building a very large pincushion, a pincushion of wind turbines, to punish Mallee voters for having the common sense to see Labor's energy pipedream for what it is. Labor are punishing the sensible Australians who yelled to the emperor that he isn't wearing any clothes and throwing them in the political clink. That's the nasty, vindictive behaviour by Labor in Mallee. Labor intend to punish regional Australians for supporting a sensible approach to energy policy, all so Labor can keep living their out-of-sight out-of-mind wind turbine fantasies in the inner cities.

I commend Peta Credlin from Sky News, and the Weekly Times for sharing my constituents' stories. Come out and take a look at the industrial wasteland Labor is creating on our paradise—our Grampians, our Wimmera plains and our Gannawarra wetlands. Australian voters can't wait for the election, and neither can I. Bring it on.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's an absolute privilege to follow the member for Mallee. I want to affirm the comments made in this chamber by the member for Mallee and the way she has articulated some of the failings of this government, as set out in this legislation.

For a starting point, I want to put on the record that there are those in this place that start their assumptions of the Liberal Party with none of us believing in renewable energy. Well, I shared this story with my colleagues before the debate started. I live in a regional precinct, and I had a journalist here in Canberra once say to me, 'When are you guys'—meaning the Liberal Party—'going to get on board with renewable energy?' You should have seen their face change—and it really gave light to what the Canberra bubble is—when I explained to them that I live in a regional area and that they would be hard pressed to find a single farm that did not have a windmill on it supplied by a company called Southern Cross Windmills. Their head office is situated in my electorate, and this year they are celebrating 150 years of manufacturing, making us the early adopters of renewable energy. When those windmills failed and we had to adopt new technologies, do you know what the technology was that most farmers went to? It was solar panels to run little Honda motor pumps to pump water for stock and for irrigation to provide the protein, to provide the fibre, to provide the vegetables—the food that goes on the plates of Australians. We were the early adopters.

I can tell the Labor Party something for nothing. If you want people to get on board with renewable energy, then you're doing exactly the wrong thing by making it even more expensive to use renewable energy. We were told on more than 200 occasions by those on the other side that under a Labor government power prices would be $275 cheaper—that the wind blew for free and that the sunshine was free. They led people along, led the Australian people along, on the understanding that their power prices would go down. With the members in this chamber at the moment I could do a straw poll and ask them to think of their last electricity bill. I know what mine was. My electricity bill at home was over $2½ thousand for the quarter. Go back three years when Labor was first elected, when we left office, the same power bill was 1,200 bucks. That's my household. I challenge—

Jerome Laxale (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mine was 30 bucks. I have solar and battery.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's excellent. Embrace the technology!

Jerome Laxale (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's right—

Marion Scrymgour (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Come on—

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, I can accept the interjections. But the household price, regardless of the household benefits you're getting, have skyrocketed 83 per cent since the Labor government come to office. There is no disputing that, and that is just in the last year. Bowen promised, when Labor first came to office, that by 2025 he would get the wholesale price to $51 a megawatt. Do you know where it currently sits, in the last year? Double that. The wholesale price is up around the $100 mark and has been for the entire year. Since this Labor government has come to office, I have seen crisis after crisis after crisis—a housing crisis, a cost-of-living crisis and now an energy crisis.

Why are we dealing with this legislation today? I remember one of the last sitting days of the last session of parliament; I think there were 31 pieces of legislation that were rushed through the parliament. There was no debate allowed on any of them. There was no contribution to be made. There was no scrutiny. There was no nothing. And at the core of this piece of legislation now, which arguably has had little or zero consultation with the public, the government is seeking to unwind those very bills that it looked to fast-track through this place. They rushed it and they made a mistake. As a result, there are unintended consequences of this piece of legislation, and it's why we will be opposing it.

I'll tell you what else gets people in regional Australia cranky: it's when the permits for windmills and solar farms get put in. I take this from a group of farmers whom I had the privilege of catching up with in Gladstone; they were from a small community called Kabra. They were complaining that the country that they owned that was being eartagged for wind turbine development was subject to a different set of rules that they were—the people who owned the place. If they wanted to build a road up to the top of the hill and clear a pad to build some infrastructure or a beautiful house site, that would not have been permitted for them as householders. But complete strangers could come in with the protection provided by the EPBC Act that made them exempt from the very rules that would have applied to the farmers. Not only are they getting it wrong on the other side of this chamber, but they're also upsetting honest, hardworking Australian men and women in regional Australia, who are having to put up with the consequences of this sham legislation. The Kabra families were concerned for the livestock that they had. They voiced to us a number of concerns that they had about construction, but, most of all, as I said, they were concerned about the inequity—that there was one rule for the developer and then there was one rule for them. They thought that that was just simply un-Australian.

As I said earlier on, the Prime Minister promised on many occasions to cut power bills by $275, but, instead, families are paying more than a thousand dollars under this costly and chaotic energy policy. Moody's last week confirmed that the installation of renewables would cost about $230 billion over the next 10 years and that that could only drive electricity prices up another 25 per cent in time. There are families that don't have solar panels and batteries and are in the same situation as I and many other Australians are, where our power bills are incrementally increasing under the failed environmental and energy policy that this government presides over. Can I remind you how hard it will be for those that are already at the brink?

Throughout my electorate, I have a number of churches and charity groups. Out the back of most of them—St Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army—they'll have food banks and they will provide cash. This will be my sixth election, and there was a period of time early in my representing the community when I would attend these food banks to assist and offer my time. Those presenting would be people that had fallen on hardship, like kids renting. The new norm at these food banks is mums and dads who work every day. They put their kids through school. The pressures on the family budget are so clumsy, so incumbent and so prominent that they're relying on the charity of others in the community just to get by under this government. I think it's absolutely farcical when the Prime Minister, early in his piece when campaigning at the last election, said that things would be better under a Labor government. I assure you that for many hundreds and hundreds of families in my electorate that is far from the case. This energy bill is only part of it.

I worry about the future as we move into election mode. What power will our country have? What will our energy prices look like in the event that there is a hung parliament with Labor at the helm and a teal-Greens crossbench? I can't think of a single teal seat or Greens seat that's got a wind turbine farm in it. They're all united in the fact that they want them. But guess where they want them. They want them in my beautiful backyard; they want them on my farms. They want them on the people of Canberra's farms, they want them in regional Australia, and they want them in regional Queensland. We are saying: 'You can't have this double standard. If you want them, you have them. You take them in your electorate. Don't jam them down our throats.'

One of the local government authority areas in my electorate is called the Scenic Rim. Just think of those two beautiful words—pristine. Without a doubt, in a heartbeat, people in inner-city Brisbane are saying, 'You've got to have them out in your area because we just can't have them here in my electorate.' Labor's renewable-only approach isn't working. I can't think of one matrix where they are meeting their targets.

Our option is for a balanced energy mix. We want to be clean, and we want to be consistent with the pathway forward. We've had an open discussion with the Australian public about nuclear. We want to have a conversation about gas. We will have a conversation about high-energy low-emissions coal-fired power stations. Our coal exports have actually increased under Labor. For a period of time, our coal exports surpassed our iron ore exports. We don't talk about that. It was interesting to hear the member for Sturt talk about our uranium deposits; they're the largest in the world. What are the emissions from uranium? They are zero.

We heard other speakers speak about reclamation work on coal mines. But where is the standard to be applied to the reclamation costs for pulling wind turbines and solar panels out? What's the cost of trying to dispose of those assets? It's all uncosted; it's all unknown. But when we put up a costing to say, 'This is what it's going to cost, and the life of a nuclear power plant can be over 80 to 100 years,' the zealots come out and say, 'We can't have clean energy that way.' It's their whole modus operandi. It's how they treat the farmer: 'There's one set of rules for the turbine and one set of rules for the farmer. We'll calculate nuclear one way and we'll calculate the disposal of renewable assets a completely different way. In fact, we may not even calculate that to put it into our overall prices.' People are seeing through this. The Australian public are seeing through it. They are reminded about the farce every time their power bill arrives.

For colleagues in the House, I will be opposing this bill. I oppose this bill because it was ill thought out. It shouldn't have seen the light of day in the first place. I understand what Labor are trying to do. They're trying to fix an anomaly that was rushed through the parliament without scrutiny, and they've been caught. I oppose the bill, and I oppose the increase in power bills from this bill. We oppose Labor's higher energy prices. Only a Dutton led government will fix Australia.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Renewable energy undoubtedly is a wonderful thing. In South Australia, we have led the nation in the establishment of renewable energy. In fact, there is 2,400 megawatts of installed capacity in South Australia. But there is a bit of a rider here. While we've got 2,400 megawatts of installed capacity, AEMO will not allow the wind generators to generate more than 50 per cent of that at any one time. When I drive around my electorate, which hosts many of these wind farms, it's one of the reasons that, when the wind seems to be strong enough and the price is good enough, they are still not turning. The reason they are not allowed to operate is that the grid, without some base-load generators—like gas in South Australia's case—is too unstable.

South Australia has led the charge on renewable energy, and I think there's a lesson here for the rest of Australia. Around 70 to 75 per cent of our electricity is coming from renewable energy. We have double that of the next mainland state. I might say your state, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie, is in front of that, but you are running on historical hydro assets. But, for the mainland, South Australia leads the charge at around 74 per cent. The next state is Victoria. They have half that, around 32 per cent.

It's not the only thing that South Australia had led the charge on. Not only do we have double the next state's renewable energy but we have, by a margin of 50 per cent, Australia's highest retail price. You cannot disconnect the two events. It's not possible to say that South Australia has 75 per cent renewable electricity, but it's just a quirk of nature that somehow our retail prices are 50 per cent higher than the next state, which is New South Wales, by the way.

This is having an unbelievably detrimental effect on South Australia and our industries, our manufacturing industries in particular. I met with a number of rather large ones in recent times that are bemused by the fact that, in a place where we have adequate renewable resources, also fossil fuel resources and, of course, nuclear resources, somehow we not only are leading the nation but are right up amongst those in the world on electricity prices. The issue really is—and I did hear the previous member for Bennelong interject, talking about his power prices—that there is an embedded and hidden subsidy system that supports renewables. That is why a wind generator, or a solar cell for that matter, can sell electricity into the market at a profit when the wholesale price is minus $60 a megawatt. They sell, at a profit to them, at minus $60 a megawatt hour.

What makes up the difference? It is the retailers, who are forced to buy this energy off the generators at a negative price, who then slip it onto our retail bills; that's why South Australia has such high retails bills. But it's not detailed on our retail bills. It doesn't tell us the reason your retail bill is so high is that we are paying a subsidy to the wind generators that have cut off the traditional forms of generation. I think any system that is so confusing that the man on the street can make no sense of it all is pretty difficult. If you've got a long afternoon, I'll explain to the parliament how the bidding stem works; it's a complete mystery within itself. It's hiding the reality and its punishing industries along the way, which is why we have that higher price.

This bill is about giving the minister—it's an oversight fixing up a problem from before, perhaps—more power to approve offshore wind. I've visited Germany. I was very interested in their Energiewende, which is their transition from fossil fuels to renewables. I have a friend in the German parliament who is beside himself at the moment at the speed at which they are losing industry in Germany. It is being shipped out to countries that don't care so much about emissions, it would be fair to say. When I read up and when I checked when I was there—it was a little while back now—basically, offshore wind generators cost about three times the price of onshore wind generators. Why on earth would someone build them offshore if they're more expensive to build? That obviously it has to feed back into the price at some stage.

The reason is—particularly in Germany but also here in Australia, we're finding now—that people don't want to be looking at them. They want renewable energy, but they don't want it on their patch. The previous speaker just touched on that, somewhat. We don't see wind farms in and around capital cities. We don't see them in Adelaide on the Mount Lofty Ranges. But we do see them when we get further north and out of Adelaide, in the hills around Burra or Port Augusta. It's okay to have them up there, but we certainly don't want them where the general public has to look at them. It's pretty much the same with solar farms. Some of my farmers welcome the wind farms; they pay pretty well per tower installation. Not so much do the rest of the community, as a rule, because they get to look at the turbines and they largely don't get any financial benefit. And they're not big employers. In the end, there's a fair bit going on when they're constructing them. I was only recently looking at some farms that have been constructed around Burra, which is a beautiful part of the world, and the mess they have made on the tops of the hills. They've ripped out native vegetation, which is hundreds of years old. It's disgraceful, really—nothing else. A farmer would never be allowed. We have non-clearance rules in South Australia. They've been there for 30 years. Farmers aren't allowed to clear their land, but it seems that, of course, windfarm operators are. They're all in the country.

It makes you wonder where we're going here in Australia with our energy policies overall. Last week, we had three industry groups come out and implore the government to slow down the closure of fossil fuel. They said that Australia will not meet the 82 per cent target for 2030, which the government set for itself. I don't think there's much doubt about that. Not only are wind and solar approvals at a low point—the government has trumpeted them, but they are actually stuck with all kinds of approval problems at the moment—but also the thousands of kilometres of transmission lines that the government has designated are meeting local hostility. The government has worked to try and overrule local opinion here, again, and that's not really taking the community with you. If these things were so good, people would open the gate. It seems also that green hydrogen has hit the wall after an initial surge of great enthusiasm when we see Twiggy Forrest of Fortescue walk away from green hydrogen in Australia and say that he thinks the government should keep investing in it but he's not going to, thank you very much. AGL have walked away. In South Australia, we have the state government intending to build a green hydrogen plant in Whyalla and run an electricity generator off of that. Only this week, we're seeing the Premier taking issue with GFG Alliance, and there may be good reasons to do so, over a whole lot of issues. But let me point out that, when the hydrogen plant was proposed by the South Australian government, there was no talk of an offtake agreement with anyone else. They were going to use the hydrogen themselves, for their plant. My understanding is that they've ordered the generators but they haven't ordered the electrolysers. I think the state government had thought they would build it. They put down a budget figure—I don't think they'd scoped it at all, from what I'm told by industry insiders—of around $600 million. I can't find anyone in the industry who thinks they'll build it for less than double that, and I think the reality of green hydrogen is starting to sink in around the world.

I make the point that about a dozen years ago in South Australia we were the epicentre of hot rocks. We were told very confidently at that time that South Australia would be running on hot rocks by the middle of the 2020s. There's not one hot rocks facility, because in the end, after the initial enthusiasm, the costs actually beat the projects. You just could not find a cheap enough way of developing the hot rocks industry to generate electricity. It would have been perfectly clean electricity. So would nuclear generated electricity, as far as that goes. It would have been perfectly clean. It would have worked well. It was just way, way too expensive. It seems that that may be the path for green hydrogen, as much as we all hope it will happen—and I hope it will happen. it would be wonderful for my electorate if some of the projects that have been proposed get up. It would be wonderful for the world and for generating electricity. But it has to be at a price that is at least somewhere near being competitive with current electricity-generating systems. Otherwise, we won't do anything in Australia. We just will not be able to afford it. At the moment, we're seeing cafes closing up, and they're blaming their electricity prices. As for manufacturing, I have a couple of very large mineral processors in my electorate, and I know how much they are struggling with the cost of energy at the moment, particularly the electricity prices.

Minister Bowen has told us we're going to need 22,000 solar panels a day—somebody should line them up on a patch of ground and let people get their heads around it—and 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines a week. So they're looking to push for offshore wind at three times the price and have found that communities are no happier with those proposals than they were with the ones on the land, given the impact on the fishing and tourism industries.

There are alternatives. Last week I had the pleasure of going to Port Augusta and listening to Miss America 2023, Grace Stanke, a nuclear scientist and engineer, talk about her life, how she got to be an engineer in a nuclear plant and what a fan of nuclear energy she is. She explained to us all the things that happen around us that are powered by nuclear energy in one form or another or made with nuclear isotopes—things like smoke detectors and the radiotherapy that saved her father's life and perhaps mine as well. She spoke of how she enthused she was as a young woman about the fact that this source of energy already does so much good in our society. Why wouldn't we take it and do more good with it by providing cheap, clean, emission-free electricity to the world?

It's very rewarding for me, because I've had some communication with the Port Augusta community and I'm finding very low levels of resistance there. I'm not saying they're welcoming it with open arms at this stage, but they are more than happy to sit down and have an intelligent conversation about it. Having government members or their associates circulate pictures of three-eyed fish is contemptible, quite frankly. We should be having a more mature debate in Australia about these important issues than that.

This legislation is about a ministerial override, and that's the kind of thing that should scare all of us all the time. It's being jammed through in the dying days of this parliament, it must be said. This is probably the third last sitting day of this parliament, and the government want to get it through in an awful rush, against the will of communities—communities that are not keen to host these offshore wind platforms, which threaten their tourism, threaten the scenic beauty of coastal communities and threaten fishing communities, whether those threats are real or imagined. I guess that beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, but it's fair to say that there are concerns in those communities, and it's quite clear that the government has not run a thorough consulting process and taken the communities with it. It's very important. If governments want to lead the Australian public they should be prepared to speak with them and take their views on board. I'll be opposing the legislation.

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my time in politics there are few things that really get under people's skin in such a form as they will change their vote. The independent power swindle is most definitely one. It is not renewable; there is nothing renewable about thousands of tons of concrete and steel that is placed on a hilltop, or solar panels with cobalt and lead in them, where we don't quite know what happens if it gets into the groundwater. Or there are the bisphenol A and microplastics, which from these wind turbines will blow over the ground to be consumed by cattle and sheep. If you eat them, the micro plastics go into you. We've now got studies where we see it gets into the bloodstream and crosses into the brain, because it goes on a blood-brain transfer. There was a good report out the other day showing a spoonful of microplastics in people's heads. It can't be a joke because now in the stock insurance schemes I've got to nominate how I keep stock away from them, even though I don't have them. This is a nightmare we're creating for ourselves.

What happens if the cadmium and the lead get into our groundwater? What exactly do we do? How do we press reverse on that? We're not allowed to graze around them either, because of the concerns. We're seeing the decommissioning right now of some of the wind towers. The argument is about who is responsible for it. What we're seeing on farms is some farmers have been sucked in to become hosts. The swindle factories—that's what they are, and I'll tell you how they'll rip you off later on—are not really interested in anything but collecting money in a big dollops from well-meaning people who do want to do something about climate change. They use guilt to rip them off. With the farmers, they are so honourable! They say, 'We'll pay you $3,000 a tower.' Sometimes the price of a megawatt unit of power is up to $17,000—like on 5 February. You might think, that means you're going to pay that farmer for maybe half an hour of what the wind tower produces—maybe a day at best. It's nothing. But here's a trick: the farmer is responsible for the decommissioning.

Andrew Dyer, who was the Labor Party ombudsman—not us, it's not something we put up—   came back with a report and he was very diligent. He's a professor of law at Monash University. He said it's between $400,000 and $600,000 to decommission one that is structurally sound—and this is now probably a year or so old—and up to $1 million per tower that has a structural imperfection. So if you're a farmer who has 12 of them, that's a $12 million impairment on the place. These farmers are not going to get $12 million from anybody to pull them down, so you are going to have properties with a negative value. You're going to have the issue of microplastics that are fouling the land—that is definitely on the cards. You're going to have the issue of bisphenol A. You've got the issue that no-one is responsible for decommissioning them. You've got the issue that these companies that set them up become $2 companies—they flip their liability; any liabilities and they go. That's out there.

This is amazing, I reckon these people need an award. If there were an award for lobbyists for the biggest rip-off ever put onto the Australian people, these lobbyists should have gotten it. Remember, they always told us it was the cheapest, and if it is the cheapest product you shouldn't need to subsidise it at all. Let's start with the capacity investment scheme. Can anybody actually tell me—because we believe in transparency—how much we're paying these people under capacity investment schemes? Surely, we have a right to know. It's the taxpayer's money. Why can't we see how much money we're underwriting to intermittent power precincts? Let's never call them renewables. They're intermittent power precincts. That's what they are. We use this romance nomenclature such as renewables and farms. That's part of the swindle to massage you into a position of compliance. Who knows what we're getting for these capacity investment schemes? Are we paying them a 10 per cent return? I've heard 15 per cent. I've heard 18 per cent. It means that, even if they don't produce power, they get paid. I would like to buy a cattle place and say, 'Well, even if I don't produce cattle, you can just pay me a portion of the $10 million; pay me $1 million a year.'

When you give way to these bat-poop crazy ideas—guess what?—they build them everywhere! Why wouldn't you? Yet, we're not supposed to know it's commercial-in-confidence. Well, that's rubbish! It's just covering it up. Be transparent. Be honest. Tell us what's in it. The next thing is that we're creating a product that people have to buy. I can say, 'You have to buy this type of power.' Surely, if it's the cheapest, I'll buy it because it's the cheapest. Why do I have to buy it? Do you have other products in other shops where you say that, if you go, you have to buy that type of potato or you have to buy that type of laundry detergent? Why do we have to buy this product that they keep telling us is the cheapest? Shouldn't it stand on its own two feet and you buy it because it's the cheapest? Don't just buy it because you're told to buy it. Why does a country tell you to buy certain products? Well, socialist countries tell you to buy certain products. What type of country hides agreements that are underwritten by taxpayers' payments? Well, Australia. There's one. Then we build their transmission lines for them. We're told we're going to spend all this money for 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines.

Do you know any other businesses that say, 'Well, I'm going to start carting all your produce free backwards and forwards to the supermarket? Where does that come from? So we're going to do this stuff for them for free. Then there's the next swindle. We have corridors that are pushed through farmers' places. Right now, there are security guards demanding access against the farmers' rights and being backed by the police if they don't do it. The farmer has to get an occupational health and safety check to go on his own land. We're doing this in Australia. Once they get their corridors and push it through, they're basically divested from the farm, their private asset, and guess what they do? They sell it to a Spanish transmission company. Guess what they sell it to them for? Billions of dollars. So they've divested the asset off the farm, passed it through to the hands of a state government, and then onsold it for billions of dollars to an overseas organisation. It's divesting a private individual of their assets. This whole thing stinks!

We went through the pricing. This was pure genius. You get a product that you need 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, both night and day, but instead of selling it as required, which is 24  hours, it's sold in five-minute blocks. Who dreamt that up? How convenient. Anybody can produce for five minutes. You look up, and the sun is shining. I can bid in. There's a bit of a breeze; I can bid in. But they're so cunning. If you argue against them, they say, 'You're a denier! You don't believe!' There's that religious metaphor that charges in when any cult-like structure starts. They use the religious metaphor whenever they fail to try to guilt trip you in. So there's five-minute blocks. Let's say we've got 100 units. If there's a bit of breeze, they come in and say, 'We're so cheap,' and they bid negative for 20 units. They know full well that AEMO will need 80 or 100 units. Then coal comes in, and they're going to charge you $70 a megawatt hour. Then gas comes in, and they're $150 a megawatt hour. Then it goes all the way up to batteries. Then the strike price happens, where AEMO says, 'Got it.' Then everybody gets paid the highest price. Why don't you get paid what you bid for? What other market do you go to where you bid low but you end up owning the house? Do you go to a sale and say '10 bucks' and walk away and say, 'I'm going to end up with a house,' because that is how it works? It defies logic.

As I said in here just the other day, the spot price was at 57 bucks. The price in the stack went to $17,000, and no-one blinks in this country. No-one blinks and says: 'Hang on. There's something wrong with that.' There is something morally wrong with that, because it's not magic. Poor people—people who can't afford electricity—pay. I saw Mission Australia just then on television. People are living in their cars. We just sit back and go, 'Oh.' We have been so gullible that we've been sucked into this idea that it's somehow morally prudent and imperative and the top of the moral apex tree. We should put aside all our lateral vision, all our clear understanding, and actually get these intermittent power companies, bring them into the Senate, into here, sit them down and start getting some truth about this whole thing so we can stop ripping Australians off.

Stop being so naive. Stop being so gullible. Just be what you're supposed to be in this joint—a politician. It's on all sides. There's no side that's pure on this. It's this because it's worked this way for ages. Always ask yourself the question—we know it; we're all politicians—to follow the money. Who's making a motza out of this? What's driving that person? Has anybody sat down, had an inquiry, dragged these people in and said, 'Let's have a talk to you'? They might say, 'You don't believe in climate change.' It's nothing to do with climate change. I might; I mightn't. It's got nothing to do with it. I want to know where our money's going. I want to know what's going on here. Tell me. I need to know. I've got a right to know. It's my job, actually. I get paid pretty good money to find out the stuff you're trying to hide from us. When you see this, you sit back and think about it. If you sit back and have this unquestioning belief, beyond reason and beyond observation and you just blindly believe something, it's called a cult. Very smart people, decent people, get sucked into things like that. It's because they don't question. You don't have to be a cynic. You don't have to be a stoic. You just have to understand that you've got to question stuff.

We're seeing it now. Ultimately, these things fall over. Green hydrogen's fallen over. Where are the taxpayers' dollars that have gone into that? Are we going to get them back? Are these people going to pay us the money back? Of course not! 'See you.' They're gone, gone with our dough. Are we going to see it with all of these other things? Ultimately we'll be smacked on the backside by reality. As people go broke, as no manufacturing goes here and as it becomes self-evidently a total debacle, I wonder if then we'll have an inquiry where suddenly an epiphany will happen in this place. They'll say: 'What on earth did we do to our nation? How did they get away with that? Who was in politics at that stage? Why were they so naive? Why didn't they haul them in? Why weren't the questions asked?' For us who were here, what are we going to say to those people? What are you going to say to them when you see these field of intermittent power precincts that just don't work. They work for about 30 per cent. You can get to about a 30-per-cent saturation of the market, and after that it just does not work. Physics beats philosophy every day of the week.

This bill is emblematic of fiasco. The minister found out he had powers he didn't know about and now wants to get rid of them. Remember that this is the same minister who stands up with that smirk on his face pretending that he's all over the subject matter, all over his brief, has got it all under control and is actually divining a new energy system for Australia.

I'll close with this: whatever you think, if you go outside and look up at the sky, have a good look at it—that arc of heaven—just watch it and observe it both night and day, and then go down to the chamber and ask the question—

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 6.30 pm, the debate is interrupted. In accordance with standing order 192(b), the debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member for New England will have leave to continue speaking for his last 15 seconds when the debate is resumed on a future day if that is his wish.